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This past update we can noticed a great decrease in the Page Rank or our main site, as well as some of our Clients websites. Last month we had 306 good inbound links - this month we are up to 478, still good quality links. However our rank went from a 6 last month to a 5 this month.

I thought about a penalty, but then we began looking deeper into this. Our secondary site has maintained a Page Rank of 5 for about 8 months now - no changes at all in backwards links, and this too dropped a point to a 4.

We also see some competetors that have held 6's for a while, now have 5's. Yet I still come across the site that will have a Page Rank of 6 with only 60-70 inbound links - not even from "great" ranking sites!

Our position is about the same - but does anyone else notice that page rank is getting stricter? Has anyone else seen a decrease for no apparent reason?

I think this also happened some time ago, and the explanation then was that Google must've changed the "threshold". So for ex, whereas before you could've gotten a 5 PR with 30 links, now you'd need at least 50. At least that's how I understood the explanation that was given.

Since it seems pretty widespread, I wouldn't think that all those pages linking to you and to other sites added more links so the value of the link to you decreased. It must've been a change in the algo. So yeah, maybe PR did get a bit stricter this update. Just my opinion.

2_much, PR hasn't got stricter. Just rescaled. IOW a PR4 site now has the strength a PR5 site had before. This probably just is due to the highest PR10 site having a true value that was higher than before. The PR scale is just a logarithmic display of where a site ranks between pages with the base minimum PR (PR0) and the highest PR10.

our site is down 1 pr across the board. we have also noticed many other sites down from 1-2 pr.we lost abour 50 links to our site. On the good side we moved up in all the kw searches.

See... PR and SERPs are not really related.

A main site of mine was down during googlebots deep crawl (about a week).

Transferred to a new host, and googlebot continued but obviously it would have unindexed many pages that would have counted as backlinks, allowed internal PR transfer, and outbound links to other company owned domain.

PR dropped PR7 >> PR6 -- all sites and many internal pages showing PR1 - PR3 where they all had PR4 and above.

Traffic has increased though, and suspect SERP's did to on many, but didn't bother checking much since the cause was "rather known".

PR can make the difference but it's not the most important consideration.

I think rfgdxm1 has a good point. PR hasn't got stricter, Google's knowledge of it's "know" www has grown, therefore unless you manage new links (or PR on existing links increases) at the rate Google's archive increases your current PR will depreciate over time.

I can confirm this observation. I could keep PR6 for my homepage, but quite a few pages on second or third tier went from 6 to 5 or from 5 to 4. But I am doing fine with the SERPS - mostly improved in this and the last but one update.

I noticed a strange thing with backward links for the last two updates. link: www.mysite.com went down from ca. 1500 to 1000 for the October update and down from 1000 to ca. 900 for this November update. I definitely did not lose any links, even got a few excellent dmoz links more and a bunch of links from low-ranking sites. Still found no explanation for this.

Needs much more and broader research, but from what I've heard so far this might be a starting point. Many many people have reported a rise in PR over the last two updates, many people report a slight drop. A direct connection to rankings wasn't seen in either dropping or rising.

I was hoping to see a change from PR 5 to 6 during this update but most pages stayed the same. We added content and links during the last cycle also.

I am not sure as to the accuracy of this but I read in another thread in WebmasterWorld where someone speculated that there is only so much pagerank to spread between the pages indexed. If Google is doing a better job of crawling dynamic sites this could increase the number of sites in the index and spread out the PR.

my main site went down from PR7 to PR6 last update and stayed down this update although the number of backlinks increased from 1230 to 2020.

apart from PR (of PR representation on the toolbar) scaling having changed there is one possible cause:

more than half of my backlinks come from my users' pages (my main site is a community). there used to be a link back to the frontpage on the bottom of each page. before september update i added a second link to my second site, which was new.

so the value transfered to the frontpage had to be shared with the new link on each page. (disregarding all the othe linking as this hasn't changed).

i have two PR6 sites instead of one PR7 now. i think that's a good example on how important the number of links on the linking pages are.

Sounds like we are not alone.. And Fathom - I have been researching the "major" sites that we link to - and all have maintained (and/or increased) the number of inbound links. Most of our links are Client sites that we designed - but we do have link exchanges with a few (meaning 20 or so) good ranking sites.

I think you folks are hitting the nail on the head when you said that PR is being "rescaled". Yet in still, this does not answer the question why one of our Client sites has HELD a PR5 for over a year with only 4 inbound links.

Guess we just have to see what next month will bring. At least PR is just a number - as long as we are up top in the results, I cant complain.. KUDOS TO GOOGLE! :)

After looking into the drop in PR. I noticed that entire categories went down by 2 points. Most of my sites went from pr6 to pr4 and only one 6 maintained it's pr6 with over 450 incoming links. It seems definite that Google has changed it's meaning of what a pr6 site is. It would be nice to know what is required to get each of the different pr levels.

My home page has been at 6 for months, although my toolbar rank has flirted with 7 occasionally (and very briefly) during the last couple of monthly updates. And several of my articles have gone up from 5 to 6.

I noticed that a major "network of sites" (rhymes with "Snout" dot com) dropped from 8 to 7 for a while during this month's update but went back up to 8, which has also happened during previous updates.

Of course, there's no way of knowing if my home page has gone from 6.01 to 6.99, or if that "network of sites" has gone from 8.99 to 8.01. But I imagine that, if a home page or internal page is occasionally bouncing above or below its normal PageRank, the page (and possibly the site) has had an upward or downward change in PR.

Will you get a PR from a site hosted in a foreign country and written in a foreign language?

The info I got from one of the "experts" - (I don't trust his opinion, he was wrong too many times) - that a PR from a foreign site will NOT help you much because googlebot will not be able to match the theme of the foreign site to your own site's theme. (Apparently "spiders" suffer from the language barrier , too :)

The info I got from one of the "experts" - (I don't trust his opinion, he was wrong too many times) - that a PR from a foreign site will NOT help you much because googlebot will not be able to match the theme of the foreign site to your own site's theme.

The general wisdom seems to be that Google doesn't use "theming," but keywords in anchor text may be important. If that's the case, the language of the site that links to you probably isn't important.

In other words, if the German-language Web site of Flughafen Widgetburg links to your Airports of Bavaria home page with the title "Airports of Bavaria," the fact that the surrounding text is in German shouldn't matter. To Google, the "Airports of Bavaria" anchor text is what counts.

I gained 5 PR6 pages this month between two sites. One of the sites is one I haven't worked on much in months, but it does have content that tends to get unsolicited .edu & .org links so I guess that's where the increase came from.

Some marketing person had been bugging me to sell them advertising space on one of my sites lately. I don't even have any ads now on the site and it's fairly unrelated to their topic, so I didn't know why they were bugging me. Duh. I hadn't looked at the site in awhile and had not realized it had multiple PR6 pages.